The New Job

Here I sit on the eve of the first day of my fourth week at work. I promised my faithful blog readers (both of you) that I would post a blog about my first week of work. Since that is now two weeks overdue, I will post about my first three weeks of work.

The problem here is that there is so much to include that I don't have any clue where to begin. I'll start with the eagle-eye overview.

17 new hires started in the Nuclear Engineering and Planning Department (NEPD) on the same day that I did, as a result we have been going around the shipyard and attending our various classes as a pack. It's nice to have a group to do everything with. It makes the transition more comfortable for us. The down side, however, is that even though we are doing everything we can to blend in, the pack behavior gives us away as a bunch of greenhorns no matter where we go.

Our little pack splits up on occasion to visit different parts of the shipyard and the nearby submarine base, Bangor. We also have attended meetings to become acquainted with the various division heads within our NEPD department. All of these meetings are very informative and we are learning very quickly.

In the past weeks we have also found that we don't quite have enough to do to fill our time, so we've had a few early days. I figure we should live it up, because they won't last long once we all go our separate ways and begin work in our respective departments.

We have people from the group that are from Montana State, Boise State, Washington State, University of Utah (other than me), Brigham Young, Brigham Young Idaho, University of Wisconsin and others. I think it's interesting that the largest representation is us mormons from Utah, BYU and BYUI. There are many facets to doing nuclear work and that requires so much expertise from all types of engineering.

If you want to know more about how a nuclear plant works with it's steam generator you should look it up on Wikipedia. That much isn't controlled information.

Celebrity Moment

Normally I'm not the one to try to see celebrities from my favorite shows. In general I think it's kind of a waste of time. I have, however, had a celebrity sighting that I got very excited about.

This weekend Chelsea's old roommates came up to spend some time seeing Seattle and the Kitsap Penninsula. Since the space needle was indisposed because of an annual music festival, and downtown was in a general state of disarray due to the Labor Day crowds, we decided to go see some of the lesser known attractions. Among those on the list was the Freemont Troll. (As seen in "Ten Things I Hate About You" and pictured here.) Since I've never driven there myself we got to do some great exploring while we zeroed in on it's location.
So there we were driving around Lake Union and going up and down some nice hills, when all of the sudden we crested on a hill and down on the water I could see the North American!!!!! This is one of the boats from one of the greatest TV shows in the history of man: Deadliest Catch. It's captained by Sten Skaar. I tried to get down closer but these were the only pictures I was able to get of it. If you are curious about the boat, you can check out the Discovery Channel website here.So there you go, to me the celebrities of the show are the boats.